(15-12-2012 07:30 PM)Phaedrus Wrote: Suicides with guns is just irrelevant, as you should know (blowing your brains out is not materially different from jumping off a bridge or putting your head in the oven). Accident rates are tiny.

(15-12-2012 07:30 PM)Phaedrus Wrote: Yes maybe. The UK has looser gun laws than Germany or the Netherlands, and has a lower gun homicide rate than either of them. Hmmmmmm?

That's not true.

"In the United Kingdom firearms are tightly controlled by law, and while there is opposition to existing legislation from shooting organisations, there is little wider political debate, and public opinion favours stronger control. The British Shooting Sports Council now believes that the law needs to be consolidated but it does not call for a review. The United Kingdom has one of the lowest rates of gun homicides in the world with 0.22 recorded intentional homicides committed with a firearm per 100,000 inhabitants compared to the United States' 2.7 and to Germany's 1.1."

Edit: Actually, Germany's rates aren't significantly higher than those of the UK and neither are those of the Netherlands. It seems like whoever created the table on Wiki didn't properly put all the numbers in the right category. It turns out that Germany has a homicide rate of 0.06 (UK has 0.04), not 1.10. The Netherlands actually have a homicide rate of 0.20, not 0.46.

(15-12-2012 07:30 PM)Phaedrus Wrote: Suicides with guns is just irrelevant, as you should know (blowing your brains out is not materially different from jumping off a bridge or putting your head in the oven). Accident rates are tiny.

I never said that they were relevant, especially since that data isn't available for other countries [Edit: It now is.]. What you should be comparing are the homicide rates. The US rates are about 3 times higher 50 times higher than those in Germany and about 75 times higher than those in the UK.

(15-12-2012 07:30 PM)Phaedrus Wrote: Yes maybe. The UK has looser gun laws than Germany or the Netherlands, and has a lower gun homicide rate than either of them. Hmmmmmm?

Not really.

"In the United Kingdom firearms are tightly controlled by law, and while there is opposition to existing legislation from shooting organisations, there is little wider political debate, and public opinion favours stronger control. The British Shooting Sports Council now believes that the law needs to be consolidated but it does not call for a review. The United Kingdom has one of the lowest rates of gun homicides in the world with 0.22 recorded intentional homicides committed with a firearm per 100,000 inhabitants compared to the United States' 2.7 and to Germany's 1.1."

(15-12-2012 07:30 PM)Phaedrus Wrote: Suicides with guns is just irrelevant, as you should know (blowing your brains out is not materially different from jumping off a bridge or putting your head in the oven). Accident rates are tiny.

I never said that they were relevant, especially since that data isn't available for other countries. What you should be comparing are the homicide rates. The US rates are about 3 times higher than those in Germany and almost 100 times higher than those in the UK.

And I call bullshit. Look at the total murder rate, not at the murder rate by firearm.

Skepticism is not a position; it is an approach to claims.
Science is not a subject, but a method.

(15-12-2012 08:41 PM)Chas Wrote: And I call bullshit. Look at the total murder rate, not at the murder rate by firearm.

You've made the same meaningless argument in another thread about gun laws. Why would gun control influence and lower anything but the murder rate by firearms? The murder rate of knives, baseball bats and any other weapon that is not a firearm that influences the total murder rate is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.

(15-12-2012 08:41 PM)Chas Wrote: And I call bullshit. Look at the total murder rate, not at the murder rate by firearm.

You've made the same meaningless argument in another thread about gun laws. Why would gun control influence and lower anything but the murder rate by firearms? The murder rate of knives, baseball bats and any other weapon that is not a firearm that influences the total murder rate is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.

Comparing the murder rates by firearm between a country with strict controls and the U.S. is misleading (at best). When the argument is that strict gun control lowers the murder rate appreciably, you have to look at the total rate. So let's.

The murder rate by firearm in UK is 1/100 that of the US, but the overall murder rate in the UK is more than 1/2 that of the US. Conclusion? People are being murdered by other means in the UK at a far higher rate than the US. Better start looking at knife control.

Skepticism is not a position; it is an approach to claims.
Science is not a subject, but a method.

(15-12-2012 08:45 PM)Vosur Wrote: You've made the same meaningless argument in another thread about gun laws. Why would gun control influence and lower anything but the murder rate by firearms? The murder rate of knives, baseball bats and any other weapon that is not a firearm that influences the total murder rate is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.

Comparing the murder rates by firearm between a country with strict controls and the U.S. is misleading (at best). When the argument is that strict gun control lowers the murder rate appreciably, you have to look at the total rate. So let's.

The murder rate by firearm in UK is 1/100 that of the US, but the overall murder rate in the UK is more than 1/2 that of the US. Conclusion? People are being murdered by other means in the UK at a far higher rate than the US. Better start looking at knife control.

(15-12-2012 09:10 PM)Chas Wrote: Comparing the murder rates by firearm between a country with strict controls and the U.S. is misleading (at best). When the argument is that strict gun control lowers the murder rate appreciably, you have to look at the total rate. So let's.

The murder rate by firearm in UK is 1/100 that of the US, but the overall murder rate in the UK is more than 1/2 that of the US. Conclusion? People are being murdered by other means in the UK at a far higher rate than the US. Better start looking at knife control.

(15-12-2012 10:04 PM)Chas Wrote: Of course it does, but so what? It doesn't make people appreciably safer.

Consider the context of this thread. Stricter gun laws seem to reduce the number of mass shootings significantly. In Germany, for example, there have been ~7 [1] [2] [3] mass shootings in the last 13 years. The US, in comparison, has had 29+ [1] [2] [3] of them in the same time period.

(15-12-2012 10:32 PM)Phaedrus Wrote: Chas does have a point. The intention of all these gun regulations is to make people safer, right? But if it doesn't make people much safer, is it worth the trouble?

As far as my personal opinion goes, I think it's already too late to make any changes in the US. There are far too many guns circulating for stricter gun control to make much of a difference at this point. And it's not only that, it appears that the general public and the NRA are not in favor of more severe gun laws in the first place.